Reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition systems can include a plurality of airborne platforms or air vehicles, each carrying a plurality of sensors that are used to collect information about an area under surveillance. The airborne platforms can communicate with requesters, which can include persons or equipment, that desire access to data collected by the sensors and may be located in one or more ground stations. Complex surveillance systems can include a plurality of communications and sensor systems that collect information about an environment, process that information to obtain meaningful intelligence, and communicate the information to an entity that can take action based on the information.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Electro-optical (EO) or infrared (IR) sensors can be used to produce images of areas of interest. These images can include a large amount of data that must be rapidly processed and communicated to various equipment and/or users of the surveillance system. Communication bandwidth, the amount of data to be transmitted, and the distance the data must be communicated, all affect response time.
Network bandwidth speeds, as well as sensor throughput rates, are increasing at rates that are faster than the latest blade servers can deal with effectively. A 1 Gb/s Ethernet is deployed in a current surveillance system architecture with 10 Gb/s Ethernet being a planned replacement due to increasing throughput demands levied by such advanced payloads as hyperspectral and HDTV sensors. The blade servers are becoming an input/output (I/O) bottleneck and the limiting factor in high bandwidth data network transfers. This is due in part to the multiple internal copies of payload data that need to be made. This can overwhelm the internal memory bus of the blade central processing unit (CPU).
It would be desirable to standardize the sensors and communications data link interfaces at both lower and upper levels to allow for sensors, communications data links, and ground station upgrades. It would also be desirable to have a system with sufficient bandwidth to provide for near real time signal processing and communications. Therefore, there is a need for a data processing system that can reduce the time required for disseminating the collected information.